


Ding, Dong, Bell

by Vehemently



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-06
Updated: 2013-04-06
Packaged: 2017-12-07 15:48:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/750257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vehemently/pseuds/Vehemently
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Who put her in? Little Tommy Lynn. Who pulled her out? Little Johnny Stout.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ding, Dong, Bell

For the first time in ten days, it did not rain, and so John Winchester took his children outside to avoid having them evicted for noise. Dean, for one, was berserk with cabin fever, and had spent the early morning stuffing crayons up his brother's nose, so that the day had begun with screaming and one bath already for Sam. Who sat sulking and with his hair still wet in the front seat, while Dean was exiled to the back, his enthusiasm impregnable.

"Can we play ball, Dad? I want to play ball," came the chant from over John's shoulder. He glanced in the rearview and saw his older son splayed across the seat, bobbling a baseball hand to hand. It was the real McCoy, not a wiffle ball or the squeezy fabric one Sam had gummed on as a baby. Dean was staring mesmerized out the front windshield, the countryside all alike to him. His father turned down the radio.

"You toss that ball in the car one more time, I am pulling over and you'll never see it again." The last thing John needed now was a missile flying around inside a moving car. Sam climbed up to look over the back of the front seat, and John snagged him by the seat of his shorts. "Down, kiddo. If your brother hits you in the face with that thing he will be _truly sorry_."

Sam obeyed, nodding gravely. "Not nice," he pointed out.

"D -- Darn right," John said, and at that tiny hesitation Dean perked up, eyes on the rearview mirror. He wasn't _sure_ he'd narrowly missed a swear word, but it seemed pretty likely. "We'll be there in a little while, and then you can both get out and play ball. Wiffle ball, Dean. Put that thing away."

Dean gave a vast, disgusted sigh, and dropped the baseball into the footwell, where it rolled every time John turned the steering wheel. Looking for something else to do, he stuck his face to the window, mashing his nose flat, and blew out his cheeks. His dad looked at him funny, but didn't tell him to stop.

At last they arrived where they were going, and as John had promised it was indeed a field, everything brighter and greener and lusher than usual, thanks to the week of downpours. They were well outside of the edges of town, down the end of a rutted road with weeds in the middle of it. They'd passed a dying rusty mailbox on a post, its front grate flopped open like a tongue hanging out, but that was all the sign of civilization they'd seen since leaving the state road. The field itself was wild, crabgrass and clover and tall rye stalks at the edges, moving in, nature reassuming what once had been wrested from it.

In the front of that open space, facing the dirt track where John parked the car, was a rectangular box outlined in concrete. Dean was just able to restrain himself in the back seat till the engine shut off, and was out like a cannonball to tumble into the grass. "Hey!" barked his father after him, collecting Sammy from the front seat and setting him on the ground. The dirt was loose, muddy, and the short edges of grass squelched under his shoes. "Dean Brackett Winchester, you get your butt back here."

The baby would be invisible in the taller grasses, near the tree line. Belatedly John realized this might not have been the best plan. He stuck a finger in the back of Sam's collar while he watched Dean dawdling back toward him, cockleburrs already in the creases of his striped t-shirt.

"Ground rules," John grumbled, while Dean hung his head. Being middle-named was serious business, and after the crayon incident from earlier in the morning, he wasn't going to find much leeway in his father today. "Number one, you do not go into the trees. I don't care what you see in there, I don't care what kind of rabbit you think you're chasing, you go in the woods I tan your hide. Number two, no pets in the car. And no scaring your brother with whatever you find."

Sam heard that one, and tugged himself free of parental restraint. "Da-a-ad!" he cried, pre-emptive. If Dean didn't kill him first, that boy was doomed to grow up a tattler.

Dean was kicking at the big purple clover blossoms, jaw set. John told him, "I got work to do here. I'm not making you watch your brother, so quit sulking." He swatted his son on the back of the head as the kid turned and loped into the late-morning sun. The sun glinted off his hair like some kind of magazine ad for rambunctious children. "Now you, bug."

The bug in question was stooping on his fat little legs to investigate a worm, drowned in a puddle. "Lookit, Dad."

"That's good, Sammy. Car's home base today. If I stand up and try and tag you, you put your hands on the car and you're safe. So stay close. And... try not to make too much of a mess."

That was a lost cause, probably. Sam absently wiped one muddy hand on his shorts, fascinated with the drowned worm. John decided to leave him alone, and got down to business. He stepped over the narrow concrete wall and into the footprint of the house it had once been. Only two years ago, now; there ought to have been more evidence all around of the ruined building, but what nature hadn't taken care of salvagers had. Doorknobs, pushpins, half a ragged blanket -- there didn't seem to be any artifacts of the house that had been here, just its blank foundation sticking up out of the buttercups.

John crouched to sift his fingers in the soil and came up bloody: a tiny shard of glass stuck out of the ball of his middle finger. Of course. He glanced aside to check that Sammy was wearing his shoes, and discovered the kid was hands and knees in the grass on the far side of the car, picking clover leaves and chewing on them. Every time, he wrinkled up his nose and spat them out instead of swallowing, green pulp in a drool down his chin and onto his t-shirt, but every time, he went back for another three-leafed stem. John chuckled to himself, and picked the glass out of his hand. That quarter-inch knife, and a million like it strewn in and around the foundation: all that was left of a house, and a family, and a life.

He'd spent weeks on it, finding the fires, tracking down their circumstances, interviewing the survivors. He'd had no idea there were so many housefires, till they became a topic of interest to him. This one had gutted the house and wiped out the whole family: father, son, and the mother had died in the hospital four days later. The son was about the right age, seven months old. The mother had been too far gone for anything like a witness statement, so John was pretty much crossing his fingers and hoping for a sign. He sketched the house's floorplan into the book, guessed at which room had been where. He glanced up, found Sam with one eyeball and Dean, impersonating a three foot tall frog, with the other, and went back to work.

Dean had spent days cooped up with a two-year-old brother and a dad busy reading smelly old books. Of course he was going to explore. He didn't go too far, not so far his father couldn't stand up and see him. But you find the best bugs in the wildest parts, which is also the place you find rabbits, mice, moles, rats, and maybe if he was really lucky a fox. He stalked paths through the shoulder-high grasses, blowing out air through his cheeks, too cautious to whistle. Too quick a move, and the thrushes would startle, up into the air, wings singing.

He was tracing off the boundaries of what had used to be the house's back yard, just shy of the forbidden trees, when he found a pile of rotting plywood. "Cool," he said to himself, because everybody knows that bugs like rotting things. There were three or four big sheets of the stuff, one on top of the next, and Dean stepped onto one and crouched to poke at the edges of the next. It smelled like farts and like moldy bread. Digging in his fingernails, he uncovered a thin line of congealed dirt and rotten leaves, full of thumb-sized beetles. They panicked at the daylight, and skittered in all directions, one of them marching right over the toe of his sneaker. "Oh awesome," Dean cried, and stood up to chase that one, to catch it and show it to Sam. Beetles weren't like cockroaches; there was no reason they fell within the definition of "scaring your brother" as spelled out in the rules.

But as Dean stood, he experienced a weird sensation that he was not getting any taller, in fact that he was shrinking somehow. A groaning noise ended with a startling crack, and while he was still drawing his hands in to his sides he realized that he wasn't shrinking: he was falling.

The shriek brought John's head up, of course, but too late to see Dean disappear into the ground. He spun around, horrified, convinced instantly that some kind of wild animal was on the prowl. Sam sat frozen next to the car under his father's gaze, eyes enormous, till John took a step and saw the hole in the uniform height of the waving rye. Guessing already, he dropped everything and ran.

As he got close, he could see the dead, flattened plants the plywood had covered, wet leaves from seasons past in a soupy crumble. Half a broken board stood out of the ground like a crazy grave-marker, like a signpost. John ripped the remaining boards out of the way and threw them behind him till he'd gotten to solid ground. Solid ground and a gaping circle of carefully-laid stones: an old-fashioned well. John flopped to his knees and dug his fingernails into the cold gray cobbles and leaned over the hole to shout, "Dean, hey Dean!"

There wasn't any answer at first, and John peered into the dark, deafened by the sound of his own breathing. He listened in agony for water-sounds, sick with the knowledge that if Dean was drowning there was nothing John could do about it. But the air was thick and still, not like something was thrashing down there in water. After a moment there was a dull scrape of movement and a whimper.

"Dean, did you hit your head?" John lowered himself so he was shoulders against the stone, groping with the full length of his arms down the wellshaft. But wells are ten, twenty feet deep, not three or four. He felt at the walls, down near his fingertips, and they were spongy. The rain, of course, soaking into hard-packed dirt. The whole structure had to be unstable, after that kind of soaking. "Hey, kiddo, talk to me. Can you move?"

Dean said, "Ow," in that low throaty whisper he never used any more. It was the voice he used when he asked why they had to move on; it was the only voice he'd had in the months when he was learning to talk again. A sniffle resounded against the stones, and then again, "Ow."

John raised his elbows to push himself upright, and banged into something. Sammy let out a wail right next to his ear, and sat down hard in the wet grass.

Okay. There they were, boy #1 hurt and down a well and scared, boy #2 coming right up next to the lip of a well without anybody noticing, and the biggest boy of them all sitting there with mud on his knees and two children crying, one of them hurt, and no idea how he'd let things get this far. "Mary, I swear --" John mumbled, and after a minute he pulled himself together again.

He held out a hand to Sammy. "Hey, bug, I didn't see you there. Come on, I need your help. You and me are gonna rescue your brother. You hear that, Dean?" he called, while he corralled the kid well away from the hole in the ground. "I want you to count to twenty-five, and then I'll be back. I got the tools in the car and I have to go fetch 'em."

"...Dad?" came the thin little echo. "Don't go away, Dad."

"Tools are in the car. Start counting, boy, and I'll be back when you're done."

A sniffle. "Yessir."

"Out loud," said John, while he wrangled Sammy. He waited to hear the first couple of numbers, faint like cries from far away, before he turned and sprinted back toward the car.

There was mud in the wheel wells and on the front bumper, and as he opened the front door John saw mud inside the car, too. He put that out of his head as he set the baby down on the front seat. "Here's what you gotta do. See all those toys on the seat? I need you to get them out of the way for me so your brother can sit there. Put 'em in the back seat, or on the floor, I don't care. Hop to it, and when you're done your brother will be safe."

A trail of snot marked Sammy's cheek, and he wasn't really done crying. But he stood there grasping the steering wheel with one hand and mumbled, "Yessir," just like his brother had. John shut him in and set to work gathering tools from the trunk.

And so, when Dean had counted to twenty-three, shivering in the humid gloom, a deep voice high above his head said, "Keep your eye out for the rope." He whipped his head upwards, bruises smarting, and saw in the blue circle of sky a pair of hands and something snaking down towards him.

"Dad?" He clutched his arm tighter to his side.

"There's a loop on the end of it. Pull that loop all the way down around you, under both your arms."

The rope touched him on the top of the head, and slithered down over one ear. Dean held still and it coiled on his shoulder, heavy and threatening as if alive. He didn't say anything about how badly his arm hurt. The rope kept coming, slow. Before it could fall off his shoulder and make him have to pick it up off the rocky floor, he started wiggling his shoulders this way and that, and got the loop around his body like he'd been told. He clamped the scratchy cord in his armpits, trying not to whimper at the pain that shot out down from his elbow.

"Are you set, Dean? You tell me when I can pull." John's voice echoed, an enveloping presence in Dean's ears.

"Okay," he said low, mostly to himself, to hear how the word sounded. Then, louder: "Okay, now." Instantly he felt the rope tightening against his chest, a sharp edge all around him, as if it could cut right through his shirt.

John pulled him up, hand over hand, palms rough and getting rougher. In the end, it was only about fifteen feet. Dean's fair head straggled up into daylight and John grabbed for him roughly. He almost lost his balance forwards into the hole, and forced himself sideways instead, elbow out so he wouldn't crush the child. They came up together tangled in rope, safe on the grass, breathing hard in tandem. Actually, no, John realized that Dean was sobbing.

Big, blunt fingers pulled at the knot around Dean's chest. The rope stayed where it was, snugged like an extra stripe on his shirt, and John had to unwind the boy with careful movements. That was a sure bruise, a stripe on the boy as much as on the shirt. He couldn't let go, one hand on the back of Dean's neck, in his hair, on his shoulder, which was how he found out about the arm. "Can you move it? Come on, show me."

Dean couldn't move it. He was shaking so hard he couldn't even speak, holding his arm away from his body to avoid jarring it. John let him cry it out and thumbed the tears off his face.

"All right. I guess it's broken. Your brother's waiting in the car. Hospital's not too far, and they can make it better."

He stood, and Dean crooked his neck to look up at him. His father was impossibly large, capable, amazing. There was nothing he couldn't do. He coiled the rope over his forearm, an easy repetitive motion that was soothing to watch. And then without even having to be asked, he stooped and picked Dean up, not like a baby at the hip, but like you do when you're rescuing somebody. Dean rode to the car pressed to his father's chest, wiping snot onto John's collar.

"I knew you'd come get me," he said, but he didn't say it very loudly. It seemed like a baby thing to say. He whispered it the second time. "I knew you'd come get me." If John heard, he didn't say anything about it.

They arrived at the emergency room in a clump. Dean probably could have walked, but the twenty minutes in the car had let his skinned knees stiffen and scab over. The kid had to have had the crap beaten out of him on the way down, and might have broken ribs or something else John couldn't see, so he carried the boy just for safety. Sam he carried because he knew he'd lose the squirt, dawdling or scared or his legs just too short to keep up. Good thing they were both still small; John was worn out on the day already.

It was a small, rural hospital, and everybody likes children, so the wait wasn't going to be too long. John hunted through his pockets for a superball and Sammy chased it around his father's shoes on the floor. They left mud everywhere they touched, dirty swipes and fingerprints, all three of them, all over that clean waiting room. Dean was a little cold to the touch, shock or something, so John held him in his lap. Dean didn't protest that at all, which was a bad sign of how much he was hurting. There was a scrape on his forehead, that John could feel bloody against his cheek, and more on Dean's arms and hands. At the edge of his collar, the slow bloom of bruises.

"I knew you'd come get me," Dean mumbled.

"Course I would," John said absently. "Hey, Sammy, not too far, now."

But Dean stirred a little, coming back to himself. "They said you wouldn't," he added. "But you did."

John watched Sam bounce the superball, chuckling to himself. It was small enough he could choke on it, if he put it in his mouth. John hadn't thought of that till after he'd handed the thing over. "What? Who said that?"

"The kids down there with me," Dean said. "They said you'd leave me there."

The impulse was to shake the boy, but you don't shake a boy who's probably got a broken arm. "What kids, Dean? Other kids in that yard?"

"No. They were with me in the well." John held very still, imagining more children in the ground. He wondered how and when they could have fallen, why they wouldn't scream after him as he walked away. "A boy and two girls. They said games would be better with four than with three."

"Did they have a dad to come get them?"

Dean inclined his head, nodding or pressing close John couldn't say. "Their dad's the one put them there, they said. I think he was a mean dad. Not like you."

"Not like me," John repeated, helpless, and held onto the boy.

"Anyway, it was a long time ago. They've been waiting _forever_ for another kid to play with."

Dean's hair was blond, darkening at the nape now he wasn't a toddler any more. John usually cropped it close for convenience's sake, but he'd been busy and had let it go for a while. Children grew like weeds, even in neglect, even in the shade of ruined buildings. He brushed the hair off his son's forehead and asked, "Forever like since yesterday?"

" _Way_ longer than that, Dad." Dean snorted, back to his old self. He pointed with his good hand at the soda machine on the other side of the room. "Hey, if we still have to wait, can I have a Coke?"

Sam, on the floor, sat back on his fat haunches. "Coke?" he mimicked, and broke out a winning grin.

But there wasn't time for Coke; John had just started feeling his pockets for quarters when the nurse called his name. He swore up and down that they'd have a Coke after, on the way home, and the kids were willing to take him at his word.

They both nodded off in the car on the way back to their apartment, of course. There had been too much excitement, and too much time spent waiting, and the doctor said Dean would probably do what kids do and just sleep off the worst of his bruises. Anyway, Sam was still small enough he sometimes napped in the afternoon. It gave John time to go over his notes, sitting in the car in the driveway, with the windows down and the oldies on the radio in the lazy late sun. He could stop in for a couple cans of soda later, at the laundromat across the street.

The journal was still a mess. John always meant to organize it, and then never did. He was afraid if he ever reworked it into order he would lose a detail, and the whole tangled mess of blame would come undone. Mary's murderer was close, he was sure of it this time. He turned the page and unclipped the two year old news article about the house burning to the ground. The newsprint was yellow already, brittle under his fingertips. On the page beneath, what he'd jotted down from the police records. It drew him up short, seeing it in his own handwriting: _inherited house from great-uncle_ , and below that, _three cousins, none survived_.

They'd disappeared one by one, over a year and a half. Lost in the woods, their father had said. Lost in the woods, and no search party ever found a trace.

John laid even odds with himself that those three cousins had been two girls and a boy. If he was right, they'd been down that well since it had water, since the forties. That was a long time to wait for a new playmate. He shuddered, and let himself out of the car. The boys were leaning together in the front seat, Dean's arm awkward in its big white cast. John plucked him out of the car first, heard him grumble as he tucked his head into John's shoulder. He didn't say a word when John laid him in his bed and pulled off his shoes. Little rubber-soles sneakers from Kmart that had spent the morning stepping on those kids' rotted bones. John took them out of the room and stuffed them into the trash.

Sam was a tougher job to move, crying in that dull, confused way that said he was still asleep. John knocked the car door shut with a hip and carried him into the apartment, pacing up and down the small kitchen trying to soothe the boy.

"Dad?" came Dean's voice, from the other room.

John paced into the room, Sam still sniffling on his shoulder. Now and then the baby would up and grab a handful of hair, not malicious, just grabbing, and John knew it was time for them all to get haircuts. "You did good today, Dean," he said, and sat down at Dean's side. He put a free hand on the boy's chest, to feel it rise as Dean breathed. "You kept your head together. Just, next time, you stay away from the plywood till you know what it's covering up."

"Do we have to go back there?" Dean asked, wan.

"I guess there's a little bit more I got to do. But you can watch from the car." John had never seen one, but it was all over the literature. He knew what to do in theory, or anyway a couple versions of what to do. If he couldn't chase down Mary's killer at that house, the least he could do was help out the kids who used to live there. There was plenty of salt in the trunk, but John would have to hit the store for some kerosene. And double-check the codex, to make sure whether there was anything he had to say over their bones. "Just family business. I can take care of it."

"Yessir," came the thin reply, and Dean rolled over under his father's hand. John sat there like that for a while, the weight of the baby on his shoulder, and watched Dean drift off to sleep.

The boy was a little shrimpy, but mature for his age. He was almost six and a half, and should by rights be starting first grade in the fall. If they stayed put. There was a lot John knew he needed to learn, and not all of that was going to be in a classroom.

"Maybe when you're a little older," he said, and pulled his hand away, "I'll teach you how to shoot." If Dean had been awake, he would have responded to that.

John put Sammy down in the other bed and watched him settle. The sun was lowering, long shadows stalking the corners of the room. July was nearly over. John let himself out of the apartment, and as night began to fall he plugged quarters into the laundromat's machine for two Cokes.


End file.
